Strings
by Zombie Ladybug
Summary: There is nothing more offensive than argyle. USUK, AU.
1. Strings

There was a brown sock upon his bed.

Not really brown, brown was far too simple a word to define the actual color of that article of clothing; it was a sort of grayish dark beige, like one of those weird strings your grandma buys to make crochet rugs that will never ever be used, and it had some details in different shades of the same unpleasant color.

Oh, and details here actually mean _argyle_. Who the hell has argyle socks? Besides substitute teachers in vintage novels, of course.

The more Alfred stared at the sock, the more inconceivable it became. It was only one foot, sprawled on top of his bed amongst all the clean clothes, looking terribly out of place in the middle of the blue and white profusion. There was, in fact, a brown jacket somewhere, but it was a pretty brown, sort of chocolate-y, and therefore matched nothing at all with that stupid sock.

Sighing, he picked up the sock with all the care of someone designated to hold a cup containing samples of blood infected with some sort of flesh-eating virus, and went down the stairs of his building to the laundry area. Out of all eighty apartments in the building, the odds that the owner of that abomination would decide to show up before his entire closet was infected by the grandma's crochet colored argyle pattern seemed to be very low.

His flip flops clapped against the stairs, which was a good thing, because the silence that took over the building in working hours was almost suffocating. He lived in the seventeenth out of twenty floors, and the elevator had been shut down due to energy rationing reasons – which made him lower drastically the number of times he ever left the apartment in general. He yawned, rubbing lazily one of his eyes beneath the glasses, and pushed open the laundry's door with his shoulder, almost toppling over the person who was trying to open the door from the other side.

"Oi, watch where you're going!"

Alfred's brain decided to ignore the message and focus on more important things, such as the cool accent that pronounced it. A lazy synapse told him to open his eyes, and he partially obeyed it.

"Mm?"

Really green eyes looked at him in annoyance. A thin mouth twisted to the side completed the expression, that other equally lazy synapse noted to match the features of the guy in from of him quite well.

"I do think it'd be highly impractical trying to expose the fact you almost—why d'you have my sock?"

Sock? He looked at his own hand and remembered the reason he was there in the first place. Oh, yeah. He looked back at the guy, wearing a vest on top of a T-shirt and Oxford shoes, and from him back to the sock. Indeed, the images matched. He turned back to him and smiled.

"You have odd clothes."

The thin lips twisted even more towards the left, and some color rose to the pale face. The lazy synapse from before decided this expression suited even more the face of that poorly dressed stranger.

"Be that as it may, I'd like to be in possession of all my odd articles of clothing, so if you don't mind…"

Alfred laughed a bit, offering him the sock still held only by his the tips of his forefinger and thumb.

"You speak in an odd way, as well."

The man sighed and closed his very green eyes, taking the sock brutally to himself while anger started painting his face red. Frankly, there was a maximum of stupidity he could tolerate at ten in the morning of a Saturday, without a single cup of tea in his organism.

"Well, if you excuse me, I and my oddities have more to do than talking to rude strangers. Good day."

He made to leave, a pile of clean clothes dangling in his arms while he tried to squeeze himself between the small doorway and the obtusely large American.

"Alfred."

He looked over his shoulder, frowning slightly. He adjusted the weight of the pile and straightened up his column, turning more properly towards the other.

"I think you're mistaking me for someone. My name is Arthur."

"Good to know!" He smiled and stopped his glasses from sliding down his nose. "Mine is Alfred, and now I'm no longer a rude stranger, right? At the very least, I'm a rude acquaintance. Would you and your oddities have time for one of those?"

"You'll always be strange, don't fool yourself." Said Arthur laughing and shaking his head. "Unfortunately, I and my oddities must still conjure up a way of taking all this" and he pointed at the clothes in his arms with his chin "up sixteen flights of stairs."

"Sixteen? You're the guy who moved last week to 174?" Arthur nodded slowly in agreement, wondering whether he really should be giving out details of his whereabouts to that person. At last, he surmised he would eventually figure it out anyway, cleaned his throat and said a very unconvincing 'yes'.

If Alfred noticed the distrust and distress that were shouting at him from those green eyes, he promptly ignored them and smiled from one ear to the other. In his defense, he probably didn't notice them.

"Awesome! I live right across the hall, at 171. Lucky, huh?"

Luck never seemed quite as relative a concept to Arthur as it did right then.

"I mean, I can help you and all. After kidnapping you… sock… it's kinda the least I can do." He said while cleaning his glasses, for he had just noticed a fingerprint on the lens that was very much distracting him from the very green eyes previously mentioned, and that just wouldn't do.

And when he put the glasses back on his face, the frames hanging slightly low on the left side, and smiled kind of awkwardly with a hand scratching the back of his neck, Arthur decided the luck was, in fact, a perfectly adequate word to define that situation.


	2. Coffee

"Coffee?"

Arthur muffled a yawn with his hand, closed his eyes very hard and shook his head slightly before reopening them. It was a bit past eight in the morning, but his organism was still thinking Greenwich-wise and told him to get back in bed immediately.

The American in from of him wasn't going through this, logically. In fact, considering his disposition that early in the morning, Arthur wondered briefly if coffee would, indeed, be the best option for Alfred's nervous system.

"Yeah, there's this really good coffee shop right down the street! I was heading there anyway, so I thought you might wanna join or something. It's not like you _have_ to if you don't wanna, it would be really cool if you did, but –"

"Ok."

"Huh?"

"Ok, I'll go. Just give me a few minutes to fetch a clean shirt."

Alfred smiled and nodded, leaning against the rail of the hallway window while Arthur strutted back to the apartment. He stretched his body a bit off the building, looking down at the colorful ants that were the cars on the street to pass time.

Meanwhile, Arthur tried to understand the Americans' obsession with coffee whilst looking for the other foot of his shoe. Seriously, coffee tasted absolutely revolting, and it didn't even compare to the quantity of caffeine in black tea. Still, he hardly dared to ask for tea anymore in restaurants, dinners or even markets…

True to his word, the Brit showed up at the hallway again in less than three minutes. He locked the door and searched for Alfred, finding him perched on the hallway window of the seventeenth floor, dangling his feet without a care in the world. He pulled him roughly by the front of his shirt, yelling something about suicidal instincts and complete stupidity.

"Relax, Artie, I'm alive, ain't I?" He laughed, winking at Arthur much like a child that just did something really bad would wink at his accomplice. Problem is, Arthur wasn't feeling much of an accomplice just then.

"We're more than forty meters off the floor, Alfred! Did that ever occur to you? Falling from this height head first on the water would already kill you! On the pavement, then, I do—Artie?" He stopped, wrinkling his eyebrows towards the other.

"Yeah, it's a pet name for Arthur! Calling you Arthur all the time sounds too formal. It reminds me of those Round Table legends, or that guy from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or that dude who wrote Sherlock Holmes… is it just me or all Brits are called Arthur?"

Arthur made the most outraged face he could pull, because that was probably the biggest stupidity anyone had ever said about his name, but he suddenly remembered he was, in fact, already outraged at the American before, for a much more important reason, and the outraged face was replaced with one of sheer disapproval.

"Don't change subjects! Did you not hear _anything_ I've just said?" He crossed his arms, slightly reminding Alfred of a professor he had in fourth grade. That got him laughing again, logically, and then he decided they'd been stalling for far too long already. He put an arm around the other man's shoulders and started going down the stairs.

"Course I did, Artie! I think half the building did as well, hm? But one thing you should know…" He looked very seriously into the green eyes, almost forgetting for a second what it was that Arthur should know. "… I have no idea how much is forty meters."

Some good nature offenses, a matching number of sarcastic responses and several facial expressions later – Alfred had no idea there were so many ways of conveying the message "you are an idiot" without saying anything at all – they got to the coffee shop down the street. Alfred got a super sized espresso with all possible and imaginable kinds of paraphernalia on top, from milk foam to Nutella, whereas Arthur ordered black tea.

"Not even a bit of sugar in that?" Alfred asked, half of his face hidden under layers of glucose. "Seriously, that must taste like dirty water or something like that."

Cue another expression denoting "you are an idiot". The American decided that that was one of his favorites, what with his mouth hidden by the cup and the flushed skin contrasting against the annoyed green of his eyes.

"It does surprise me that you still have taste buds enough to be the judge of anything, if that energetic bomb of yours is some sort of routine." Arthur looked at the other through the corners of his eyes, chuckling at the spot of Nutella on Alfred's nose. "I really hope it isn't, because half of your liquid gastritis is spread over your face."

He laughed, rubbing a napkin across his face mindlessly. "Nah, this one is just for special occasions."

The Brit rolled his eyes, taking the paper from his hands. "You know, if you actually paid attention to what you're doing, it'd take much less." He cleaned the stain easily, being careful not to bump his knuckles on the glasses that were sliding down the bridge of Alfred's nose. "There."

Alfred blinked, the mildly fogged glasses once again askew over his cheekbones. He pushed the frame back to its due place and tried to say something, being cut off by a rather confused smile. Not shy, not ever, just confused. They finished their mutually repulsive drinks and went back to the building, discussing the true origins of rock on the way.

"Clearly American. Chuck Berry is American, your argument is invalid."

"The Beatles won't ever be an invalid argument."

"What about Elvis?"

"Pfft. One name on the rockabilly doesn't make of the US the father of rock, sorry."

Alfred laughed, he was funny. Not that he was right, he wasn't, but he was funny. They stopped at the top of the stairs, Arthur fishing his keys from his front pocket.

"Well, thanks for the tea." Arthur smiled, running a hand through his hair to get a strand off his eyes. "It was… fun."

"It really was! We could go there again tomorrow, if you have nothing better to do and stuff." He bit his lips, smiling in a way he would really like to believe wasn't hopeful.

The Brit smiled, his eyes fixed on the broken elevator. He turned them to the American, smiled a bit more and stretched his body a bit to press his lips slightly against the other's. He pulled back soon, smiled once more and said a "sounds brilliant" that wasn't heard by anyone.

But Alfred got the message, anyways.


End file.
